July 2000

Three To Beat The E-Commerce Heat

• Infinium's ASP-Model CRM

• Web Experience Evaluation By Vividence

• Kabira E-Commerce Software Solutions

For companies desiring to deploy a Web-based CRM solution in a short period of time and avoid the potential difficulties of integration, Infinium Software, Inc. is offering CRM services on an ASP basis. The Infinium CRM solution is an information system designed to support marketing, sales and business relationship management. Infinium CRM includes: a central database containing vital information about clients and prospects; market overview and insight, providing a picture of target groups as well as competitors and suppliers; and integration possibilities, allowing an exchange of customer-oriented information and data between the Infinium CRM solution, back-office applications, and the office environment. The CRM system is designed for integration into any ERP package, and to be fully integrated with PDAs. Customer interactions are at the heart of any business and the Infinium CRM database is used for all interactions. Infinium CRM also provides self-service functions allowing the management of all customer-facing activities throughout the customer life cycle.

Central to the Infinium CRM offering is the Infinium Business Intelligence Analytical Server (BIAS), designed to enable executives and decision makers to harvest the meaning hidden in business data directly from their desktops, so they can better understand information and, in turn, make wiser decisions. Using OLAP (online analytical processing) technology, BIAS provides information that is pertinent to the current analysis. BIAS provides multidimensional drill-down capabilities allowing the user to go straight from any rollup or summary view to the lowest level of detail and vice versa. Alternatively, users can go from what is at question to who owns it, using the pivoting feature. BIAS also allows users to instantly select and isolate any period or group of periods using timeline navigation. A user can navigate results across years, quarters or individual time periods with BIAS's time-domain hierarchy and built-in rollups. Users can also dynamically swap any indicator (measure), or view (dimension) between rows and columns to accomplish complex cross-tab reporting. BIAS also provides advanced visualization capabilities that aid in making business trends, patterns and exceptions intuitively obvious.
No. 516, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

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Customers form their first, and most lasting, impressions of an e-business during their initial visit to its Web site's home page. In a very real sense, home pages are portals that can lead customers on a journey of discovery through an e-business' products and services or drop them into a nightmarish abyss of frustration. Unfortunately, many companies learn too late that potential customers are falling down a cyber rabbit hole.

Vividence Corporation believes that the first step is to understand what a customer actually experiences at a Web site and which elements most impact overall customer satisfaction. Vividence evaluates a Web experience by collecting detailed data from a sample of individuals (typically 200) as they attempt a series of predefined tasks on a live site. It samples users according to target profiles from its proprietary panel of over 100,000 Web users or directly from customer lists. Two benefits are insights into users' subjective thoughts and feelings about a site and verbatim comments linked to behavioral data, such as click streams and page views. The entire process consists of three major steps: a needs analysis, during which a Vividence consultant works with a business to identify major concerns related to customer experience at the Web site; test management, when a test is designed, implemented and monitored; and data analysis and reporting. The entire process provides results in seven business days. Vividence delivers information to clients through CustomerScope, an Internet-based, dynamic report that details qualitative and quantitative data captured during a test. The report contains interactive OLAP tools to allow dynamic viewing and manipulation of data in a graphical format. Additionally, Vividence Consultant will deliver an executive analysis containing key findings and interpretations. Solution offerings include Vividence Profile, an evaluation of a single site (yours or a competitor's); Vividence Competitive Intelligence, a comparison of your site against a competitor's or two competitors' sites against each other; Vividence Plus, a series of evaluations integrated with clients' development and marketing cycles; and Vividence Direct, a yearly testing and analysis program and customized evaluations.
No. 517, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

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Kabira Technologies, Inc. offers a set of products, technology and solutions designed to enable its customers to integrate and automate their applications and service needs, and provide a flexible and scalable design environment for new service creation and implementation. Kabira's centerpiece, the ObjectSwitch Server, is a third-generation, object-oriented platform meant to provide integrated runtime services, such as recoverability, scalability, messaging, queuing and distribution. ObjectSwitch Server incorporates the object state manager that provides support for object data caching in shared memory and transaction management. Object data is shared between all applications on the same node, which is intended to allow objects to "migrate" between different applications by mapping the object to ObjectSwitch's address space. The object state manager also manages the transaction logs for each engine by providing transaction deadlock detection for automatic recovery if application failure occurs.

Kabira offers a Web adapter product that supports dynamic Web page generation, standard Web browsers, CGI interfaces, and UML-based modeling for Web interfaces. It also provides power and dynamic tag functionality. The Web adapter is intended to enable development of Web applications without the need of Web domain knowledge, reduce cycle times for Web-based application development and implementation, and the de-coupling of a business application from Web implementation.

Kabira's Design Center is meant to aid rapid implementation of complex and change-tolerant applications. It combines the flexibility of object modeling with a patented model compiler technology. The Design Center is intended to allow users to unite their business process models with target implementations. Using standard modeling tools, developers apply the appropriate implementation to their models and the Design Center generates the necessary code to deploy a complete Kabira application.

Rounding out its offerings, Kabira provides Pre-Built Solutions for service provisioning and activation for wireline and wireless voice; a CDR/xDR meditation solution, aimed at carriers deploying new services that provide nontraditional usage detail records (xDR) or service high call detail record (CDR) volumes; and a custom operational support system (OSS) using prebuilt adapters to common OSS software components (such as billing, customer care and service activation). The prebuilt adapters are meant to allow carriers to create new interactions between elements of their OSS and new services, and decrease the required deployment time of customized systems.
No. 518, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

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